Sunday Poem

A GOSPEL

That picture’s somewhere still: First Communion, 13 girls
in lace and satin 'Like a Virgin' frocks,
legs crossed man-style under frills, floral hairpieces
             hanging flaccid over ears. Marrying God. 

An over-lit confessional, gilded chairs, Father Antony’s
embroidered bib, pew-fulls of frog-eyed
parents who’d endured years waiting for our
             exorcisms. This was just before my faith fell.

I stumbled toward Hari Krishnas at the Eaton Centre
causeway and paid $20 for a tome
they would have given away; tried to find in mock-leather
            what they found there, but it hid—

or snapped up free papers about 'the 18,000 realms,'
and visited living room churches north on Bathurst
with congregations of passive mutes; or let the Bahai
            indoctrinate me on Bloor, one afternoon, 

where they fed me channah in a muralized Olive Garden
basement. I left with a cassette
and a mental image of a saviour cresting a hill
            with a hankering for garlic bread. 

My high school and university were poverty and violence. A quadriplegic
classmate lived in a Winnebago. Her mother’s ex
cowered in a laundry hamper with a gun and shot her dead
            one Sunday after Mass. That’s all I know.

From ^^^^^^ [Sharps] (Icehouse, 2014) by Stevie Howell